Out of the Comfort Zone and into the Fire: Aspirations and Challenges as Family Defense Clinicians and Students Break Ground Together

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Majestic B

Floor: Second Floor, Conference Plaza

This moment in the family defense movement provides a rich opportunity for clinics to break new ground as the field pushes into new types of advocacy. Lawyers, community activists, and academics in the field are increasingly pushing back on the family regulation system’s over-policing of low-income families. Organized efforts have pressed the media and policymakers to recognize the structural racism of this system and the harm government surveillance and intervention inflicts on families.

Family defense clinics are uniquely situated to introduce students to this crucial civil rights field and prepare them to be on the frontlines of a new era of protecting family integrity. For the first time, family defenders are developing practices outside of traditional court-centered advocacy by providing early (pre-petition) representation. They are also drawing on the tools of other fields to move from focusing solely on defense into developing affirmative litigation strategies and supporting community organizers’ efforts to transform the public narrative around child welfare.

Clinical teaching on the cutting edge of these efforts poses particular challenges to faculty who are supervising students in practices new to the teachers in a field that is shifting dramatically beneath their feet and lacks the infrastructure of more developed legal fields. This session will grapple directly with the challenges posed to clinicians who are assessing the risks of new tactics as they develop relationships with community partners. The discussion will consider how to deal with potential tensions between clinical teaching goals and optimizing clinics’ substantive contributions to their social justice commitments.